On the heels of a nine-year, $125-million renovation by Euro Capital Properties, the Watergate Hotel in Washington reopened its doors last week with 336 rooms and two presidential suites. In its new incarnation, the Watergate is trying to reclaim the glitz and glamour of its pre-Nixon era — when Stevie Wonder would play tunes on the lobby piano and Andy Warhol threw parties in his private residence. The going rates? $359 for a standard double, $800 for one-bedroom suites, and up to $12,000 for one of the presidential penthouses.

No matter how much the hotel tries to whitewash its past with regards to the Richard Nixon presidency scandal, you can still savour the fun by reading up on these other secret scandals.

The Watergate stood for US government corruption well before Richard Nixon came along In the 1920s, a Naval hospital on the site of the Watergate became emblematic of the divide between the private and public sector that persists to this day. Though the neighbourhood was home to some of Washington’s most impoverished unskilled-labour communities, its residents had no access to the sprawling healthcare compound in their backyards.

An architect, who worked on the hotel, was also a convicted Fascist Italian architect Luigi Moretti’s bestknown buildings is Rome’s sprawling sports centre, the Foro Italico — formerly called the Foro Mussolini. It’s as good an indication as any that Mussolini was one of the architect’s biggest patrons. Throughout World War II, Moretti supported Mussolini and identified strongly with the National Fascist Party and its leaders.

There was more than one Watergate break-in The hotel burglary of 1972 needs no introduction. But three years prior, in the Watergate apartment complex across the street, another incident raised eyebrows about the complex’s security standards. In 1969, Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods — a full-time Watergate resident and the woman later accused of deleting the smoking gun portion of the Oval Office tapes — arrived home to find that her jewellery box had been burglarised. To this day, the burglary is considered a coincidence, unrelated to the subsequent Nixon scandal.

Watergate was a refuge for more than one politician In 1968, the president of Panama was said to have taken up residence on the hotel’s ninth floor after being overthrown by a junta.

It was also the site of a sex scandal In 2005, the San Diego Union Tribune got a scoop that lobbyist Brent Wilkes had systematically "greased the wheels" of his political friendships, exploiting them for personal and professional gain. The newspaper reported that he bribed lawmakers by offering them access to a “hospitality suite” at the Watergate. In the multiple-bedroom suite, they’d find a rotating cast of escorts that amounted to a lobbyist-backed prostitution ring.